From: Sandy Thatcher <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Tue, 26 Feb 2013 17:47:26 -0600

I'd like to think that a good copyeditor would have caught the error
Joe brought to our attention, but David is right: this is not a
problem unique to OA publishing, and publishers--even prestigious
university presses--have indeed cut back on copyediting and
proofreading in recent years, some horrific examples of which I have
cited in book reviews I have written for Learned Publishing and the
Journal of Scholarly Publishing.

One of the worst cases I have come across recently concerned the "PA
Guide to Going Digital" published by the British Publishers
Association in 2010. As I said in my review in Learned Publishing:

No such excuse is available to explain the numerous editorial lapses,
however. Inconsistencies abound, for instance, with regard to use of
the serial comma, US or USA, capitalization, punctuation (IT or I.T.),
use of acronyms before the full names are given, and like basic points
of style. In Parts One and Two I counted over 100 such mistakes, which
are distracting, to say the least. It is shameful for a publishers'
association to issue a book in such a flawed state when it otherwise
has so much to recommend it.

The PA, to its credit, did correct these mistakes after I sent them a list.

But even those of us who take great pride in striving for perfection
fall short from time to time. The very first book I ever copyedited,
for Princeton University Press, contained an embarrassing error that
slipped through me, the author, the compositor, proofreader, and
everyone else: the name of the city "Moscow" appeared as "Mosow" on
the map that served as the frontispiece!

One all too common failure of scholarly authors is to rely on earlier
scholars to have quoted passages correctly, rather than going back to
the originals to check.  This kind of error is not something that, in
the old days, copyeditors would typically catch because checking
quotes against original sources would require the time-consuming labor
of roaming around a library's stacks. Nowadays, however, there is so
much scholarship accessible in digitized form that many quotations can
be checked via Google searches against the originals.  Despite
cutbacks in copyediting, this is a task that at least some copyeditors
now  perform, which they did not in the analog era.

OA itself is not at fault. Gold OA should maintain the same high
standards as regular publishing, though it appears that newer OA
publishers like PeerJ are not trying to do so.

My concern is with the readiness to accept Green OA peer-reviewed but
not copyedited articles as a completely satisfactory substitute for
the "versions of record."  This prompted me to join with Todd
Carpenter in guest-editing an issue of Against the Grain on this topic
back in April 2011. Here is our introduction:
http://www.psupress.org/news/pdf/fea_intro_Carpenter_Thatcher_v23-2.pdf

In a separate essay I addressed the problem in the following way:

The problem of having multiple versions of articles is a real cost of
Green OA that needs to be studied further.  Perhaps, for purposes of
teaching in the classroom or simply sharing knowledge with colleagues
around the world, unedited versions would suffice. But even at this
level there are risks of propagating errors, as in mistakes in
quotations that once used incorrectly may be multiplied many times
over, as readers do not bother to go back to the original sources to
check for accuracy but trust the authority of the scholar using them
to have quoted them correctly. (My correspondent who edits articles
for science journals confirms the seriousness of this problem: "Huge
errors can creep into the literature when authors use preprint
[unedited, unreviewed] versions of papers, and the problem snowballs:
so few authors return to primary sources that incorrect
interpretations are perpetuated and persist in the literature to
damage future generations.") Surely, then, for purposes of formal
publication, the additional level of quality control that is provided
by good copyediting is a value worth paying for, and libraries would
do well to reflect whether their needs as repositories of
authoritative knowledge would be well served by relying on anything
but the versions of articles that are in their very final form,
suitable for long-term archiving. Whether students and scholars who
access the unedited versions will bother to go to the archival
versions for citations in writings that they produce remains to be
seen, but clearly they should be encouraged to do so-students, because
they need to be taught responsible scholarly methods, and scholars,
because they have a professional obligation to their peers to do so.

How big a problem may this turn out to be? Some sense of it comes from
a recently published, and much discussed, paper with the cute subtitle
"Fawlty Towers of Knowledge?" by Malcolm Wright and J. Scott Armstrong
in the March/April 2008 issue of Interfaces, who write on "The
Ombudsman: Verification of Citations"
(http://marketing.wharton.upenn.edu/Marketing_Content_Management/Marketing_files/Publication_Files/Citations-Interfaces.pdf).
Their first paragraph neatly summarizes the nature and extent of the
problem: "The growth of scientific knowledge requires the correct
reporting of relevant studies. Unfortunately, current procedures give
little assurance that authors of papers published in leading academic
journals follow this practice. Instead, the evidence suggests that
researchers often do not read the relevant research papers. This
manifests itself in two ways: First, researchers overlook relevant
papers. Second, they make errors when reporting on the papers, either
through incorrect referencing or incorrect quotation of the contents
of the cited paper."  They go on to cite previous studies of incorrect
references in other disciplines ranging from 31 percent in public
health journals to as high as 67 percent in obstetrics and gynecology
journals and studies of errors in quotation with similarly disturbing
numbers, such as 20 percent for medical journals in a systematic
survey conducted in 2003. Remember that these errors occur in
published articles. The likelihood is that the rates would be
significantly higher without the intervention of copyeditors.

The fact is that, for all the value of peer review, it is the rare
academic reader who will take the trouble to check references and
quotations for accuracy. Scholars are aware that copyeditors can be
relied upon to scrutinize manuscripts more closely for such details,
so they generally do not bother to spend time on this task themselves.
But even copyeditors cannot afford to check everything; it is very
costly to do the kind of fine-grained editing, involving trips to the
library, that I was allowed to do at Princeton forty years ago. The
economics of publishing can no longer afford such a luxury, and many
publishers have cut back on proofreading, too, or even eliminated it
altogether for cost-saving reasons. Fortunately, the ease of access to
reliable online resources for fact-checking, reference-checking, and
even checking of quotes has made it possible for copyeditors to
continue doing some of this very detailed work even in today's economy
at reasonable expense. And editing online provides other advantages
that improve the efficiency of copyeditors and help keep costs in
check. It would be a shame if concerns for reducing costs target
copyediting as a dispensable frill, for its contribution to the
excellence of scholarship is much greater than most people who have
not directly benefited from it realize.

I end, therefore, with a question and a plea. The question is: how far
do we want to allow open access to exacerbate the problem of "Fawlty
Towers of Knowledge"? The plea is: when open access is discussed as a
panacea for facilitating the dissemination of knowledge worldwide,
don't forget the contribution that good copyediting makes to ensuring
that such "knowledge" is communicated clearly and accurately.

The full article is accessible here:
http://www.psupress.org/news/pdf/fea_Thatcher_v23-2.pdf

Sandy Thatcher



From: David Prosser <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2013 08:59:59 +0000

Between 10 and 20 years ago I worked for two large journal publishers.
One a massive commercial publisher, the other a prestigious
university press.

In neither of these organisations would copy-editors routinely
fact-check the articles they were working on, and the type of issue
that Joe has highlighted would not have been picked up.  I know that
it is tempting to view this as a failing of the APC OA business model,
but it really isn't.  The vast majority of publishers have been
striving to push-down costs, including costs for copyediting and
proof-reading.  I'm sure we all have our own lists of favourite
publishing errors (mine is a photo clearly upside-down in an article
put out by the aforementioned massive commercial publisher that made
it past the proof-reader), but let's not pretend this is necessarily

an OA issue.


David Prosser